Bank customers lose overdraft charges court case
Published: 25 November 2009 By MoneyHighStreet Staff 1 Comment
The hopes of millions of bank customers that their overdraft charges will be refunded have been dashed by a Supreme Court judgement today.
The Supreme Court has overturned a previous judgement that allowed the Office of Fair Trading to investigate charges for unauthorised overdrafts.
This means that banks will not be forced to refund millions of pounds in charges incurred by their customers when running up unauthorised overdrafts.
The initial court case was initiated by the Office of Fair Trading to see if the overdraft charges were legal. The OFT won this, however the Banks then appealed to the Supreme Court to get this decision over turned.
Now that the Supreme Court has found in favour of the banks, they will no longer have to pay out an estimated £2.6 billion to their customers.
However the OFT has previously vowed to fight the overdraft fees if it loses the appeal so it now remains to be seen if can use other means to force banks to repay the charges.
If a person goes over due to miscalculation its not the banks fault…the fault is their! if you know you get charged a ridiculous amount for going over then one should be more careful and calculate properly! The best thing to do would be for banks to have an arlert system so when you do go over you should be arlerted on the day….it would be unlikely for a bank to do this as they wouldnt make a lot of money from overdraft charges! Or instead banks should give people the option of not allowing the transaction to go through if it is going to go over the limit….again very unlikely. The best and most safe thing to do is to watch your account carefully and be an accountant for your own account…it is a lot of work but then you save yourself the trouble of being charged £35 for going over limit by a few pence!!!